Wednesday, December 4, 2013

With great gratitude to HaShem, and with great thanks for all of my friends who helped look for the tefillin and advertise their disappearance, I am glad to report that the tefillin were returned this morning. It seems that someone mistook them for his own and took them home from shul the other day.

So glad they were found! I have a crazy story about lost tefillin.The day after our wedding, my husband got up early to go daven and saw that our car had been broken into. The back window was smashed. He went to see what was missing, and although the GPS, his tuxedo and my wedding veil were still there, his tallit and tefillin bag were gone! We filed a police report and realized that the tallit/tefillin bag had been in a carrying bag that probably looked like a laptop case sitting on the seat of the car. Well - not three hours later, we got a call from my husband's uncle who was in RI (we were in NY) saying that the tefillin was found! We couldn't believe when we heard the story:The person that stole the bag must have realized it wasn't a laptop because down the road from where we were staying, the bag was found by a non-Jewish man in a bus stop. The man brought the bag to his Jewish neighbor because he recognized it as something Jewish, but the Jewish neighbor didn't know what to do with it, so he brought it to the local Chabad house. The Rabbi at the Chabad house thanked him and opened the bag, prepared to ready the tefillin for use for those who don't have. But he found a book inside (that my husband had received a day before our wedding) signed with the name of the Chabad Rabbi from Providence. He called the Rabbi who knew right away that it was my husband's tefillin because he had insisted that he put the little book in his tefillin bag. All was in tact and returned shortly there after, thank G-d!!And I think that someone did say tefillat Rav Meir Baal Haneis before they were found!!

I am glad they were found. My tefillin are about 150 years old now. Technically they have been "updated" a couple of times, but it doesn't change that they have been passed down to me and I am very aware of the connection to the past/family.

I once misplaced them and felt that same sense of loss followed by the elation of locating them.